A recurring motif permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing tens of millions to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its villains live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Fails to Transform
However, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — certainly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
